During surgical procedures, and especially during revision procedures involving removal and replacement of a prosthetic component, important bony landmarks may be damaged or lost. For example, during a hip surgery, femoral landmarks such as the greater trochanter, lesser trochanter, femoral head center, and marks from previous implants may be lost or compromised due to pre-operative trauma or due to trauma when removing previous implant components. If needed landmarks are not available, a surgeon may not be able to accurately complete a surgical procedure. For example, without a guiding landmark, the surgeon may not be able to accurately determine a proper reaming or broaching depth.
Some techniques may attempt to rely on preoperative planning to identify alternative landmarks if it is known ahead of time that typical landmarks are compromised. However, this depends on knowing pre-operatively that the traditional landmarks are unavailable and requires that other suitable landmarks can be identified. In other techniques, a cautery pen or skin marker may be used to create a reference point for a procedure such as a bone preparation for placement of a replacement prosthetic component. Still another technique is to simply estimate distances or locations. For example, a surgeon may simply estimate a proper reamer depth. All of these methods have various drawbacks including a lack of accuracy or dependency on known and favorable surgical conditions.
Other known devices may provide length or offset guides, and may utilize, for example, a fixed pin and a predetermined mark on an anatomical landmark as a reference point for measuring leg length or offset intraoperatively. However, such devices may not be configured to attach in close proximity to an unprepared bone surface or to provide a guide for bone preparation. Other devices may provide a guide for resecting a portion of a bone for example, but can be dependent on certain anatomical structures being present in order to properly guide a resection and often such devices can only be used on a prepared bone surface and may not be able to attach on or in close proximity to the an unprepared bone surface.